Superb Example of Speed’s America Map in an Unrecorded State

SPEED, John/ HUMBLE, George. [London, 1626 [but 1627]/ c.1647-61]

Western Hemisphere/ California as Island.  SPEED, John/ HUMBLE, George   [London: 1626 / c.1647-61] America with those known parts in that unknowne world both people and manner of buildings . . .  Are to be sold in pops-head alley against the Exhange by G. Humble. 15 3/8 x 20 ¼ inches. Copperplate engraving with fine hand color; bit of creasing in lower centerfold, else excellent.                                                                                                     
A fine example of this important, early English map of the Americas that arguably did more than any other to propagate the California-as-an-island myth.  As far as we are aware, ours is the only example known example of a mixed state of the map that was recorded by neither Tooley or McLaughlin; Burden reported the rumor of a state like ours.  See below for details regarding this.

Speed’s map was highly instrumental in propagating that most enduring of cartographic fallacies—the depiction of California as an island.  It was the earliest map appearing in an atlas to do so.  It seems that once maps in atlases adopted the insular depiction of California, its acceptance become widespread.  Moreover, Speed's was the definitive English map of the Americas at the outset of the English colonial enterprise in North America.  It is among the first maps to include place names associated with early English settlements, such as Plymouth, Jamestown (“Iames Citi”), "C. Codd," and Virginia.  Tellingly, the map shows no possibility of a Northwest Passage, suggesting that English attention had now turned fully to the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions of North America.

This apparently unique example of the map bears the G. Humble imprint found on the first printings of the map in 1627 and 1632.  However, it also contains the additions supposedly first found on the 1662 Roger Rea state; these include the place names for Boston, Connecticut, Long Island, and Maryland, along with a dotted line surrounding the Hudson and Delaware Rivers.  Depending on when this example of the map was actually published, it is possible some of these place names appear here for the first time on a map.  Based on current research this is difficult to determine.  Burden reports that between the publication of the second Humble issue of 1646 and the Rea state of 1662, the publication of Speed’s atlas and hence this map was was very irregular, though it did continue in the 1650s.  Burden even mentions an intermediate owner, William Garrett, who held the atlas’s plates from 1658 to 1659 before selling them to Rea.  It is clear this state of the map appeared during this interim period, but at this point it cannot be determined exactly when.

The map is a splendid engraving in the Dutch style with border vignettes showing the Indians of America in characteristic tribal dress, as well as various town plans and ports. It was in fact engraved by the Dutchman, Abraham Goos, whose son Pieter would later publish one of the most beautiful sea atlases ever produced in The Netherlands.  English mapmakers of the period often relied on the superior skills of Dutch engravers, most of whom had fled religious persecution in Holland, then under Spanish domination.

John Speed was the preeminent English map publisher of the seventeenth century; his first works were county maps published in 1611.  His first general atlas was A Prospect of the World, in which this hemisphere map first appeared in 1627.  Speed's maps profited from the technical expertise he acquired from Saxton and Norden, who brought triangulation to British surveying early in the century. 

McLaughlin, The Mapping of California as an Island, No. 3, unrecorded state; Tooley, Mapping of America, p. 302; Burden 217, unrecorded state; Leighly, California as an Island, #6, pl. IV.

 

Price: $6,000.00